When you create a new website, you are faced with many different decisions.

Some seem pretty straightforward (it should be obvious) like choosing the colors you want to combine or deciding whether to be responsive or not. Others will seem too complicated to anyone relatively new to website management, such as when choosing a hosting plan.

Web hosting can seem a little (or a lot) complicated. You have cloud hosting, shared hosting, Cloud VPS hosting, and dedicated servers to consider.

You also have dozens of hosting companies to choose from – all offering their own perks with the variety of plans they offer. There’s a lot of information to navigate and you’ll have to unravel it as you make many other choices about your site.

As if you didn’t have enough on your plate.

To help, we hope to reduce this confusion by narrowing it down to two different hosting types to see how they compare: cloud hosting and Cloud VPS hosting. We’ll walk you through the steps of realizing your plans to help you make an informed decision.

Cloud VPS hosting review

Cloud VPS stands for Virtual Private Server . This style of hosting is a single physical server split into several smaller virtual servers. Although physically part of the same server, each of these virtual servers operates as its own dedicated server environment.

Because you have your own dedicated server partition, you have your own dedicated resource group and can customize and configure your server partition exactly the way you want. Also, there is no data exchange or file access between accounts on the Cloud VPS server.

However, one of the risks of cloud VPS hosting is that if a physical server fails, any Cloud VPS using that server will also fail. Cloud VPS performance can also vary if a single site is taking over resources on a physical server – although most hosting providers separate different parts of a Cloud VPS in a way that mitigates this risk.

What is cloud hosting?

Cloud hosting is the connection of your hosting plan to a network of potentially unlimited virtual machines. All of these virtual machines are based on a basic network of connected physical servers. When all these virtual machines are connected, cloud hosting works somewhat like a large Cloud VPS.

The main difference between cloud hosting and a Cloud VPS plan is that instead of having a dedicated server for your site (as with a Cloud VPS), the resources are spread over several different physical machines.

With a cloud hosting platform, you use multiple servers so you have more resources at your disposal. You can increase the power of your server when you want to meet different traffic needs. While cloud hosting offers more flexibility than CLOUD VPS hosting, it does not allow as much customization.

Knowing the basics of each hosting type probably doesn’t tell you what you need to know to make a decision. For that, you need an idea to compare them in some of the main categories that are important when choosing a hosting plan.

 Performance (Winner: Cloud)

Performance is one of the most obvious factors to consider when choosing a hosting plan. You want to make sure your website loads constantly, is always online when people search for it, and always works as it should.

CLOUD VPS plans tend to be very high performance as a certain amount of server resources are guaranteed. And because your part of the server is separate from other parts, in most cases your performance should not be affected by other websites on the server. However, in rare cases where multiple sites on a server experience extremely high demands at the same time, the server may exceed its limits, resulting in reduced performance. However, for most people going for a CLOUD VPS plan, this is an unlikely scenario.

Cloud hosting can promise impressive uptime as the needs of all sites on the network are split between different servers. If any of them crashes or encounters higher-than-normal requirements, backups are built into the system.

Who’s winning? Cloud hosting

Most of the time, it’s almost a draw. But with Cloud VPS plans, your performance is unlikely to be affected by higher-than-normal requirements on the server, and this risk is largely eliminated with cloud hosting.